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Creating a University: UNF Oral History Project UNF History
1-19-2007
Bruce Gutknecht
Bruce Gutknecht University of North Florida James B. Crooks University of North Florida
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© 1-19-2007 All Rights Reserved Suggested Citation
Gutknecht, Bruce and Crooks, James B., "Bruce Gutknecht" (2007).Creating a University: UNF Oral History Project. 11.
Interviewer: Jim Crooks Date: January 19, 2007 C: Today is January 19, 2007. I’m Jim Crooks interviewing for the UNF Oral History Program. Today our guest is Dr. Bruce Gutknecht. Bruce, tell us a little about your personal background, why you came to UNF, and what brought you here. G: I was an elementary/junior high teacher for a number of years out of what is now called Concordia University Chicago. It was called [Concordia University,] River Forest at the time. And I taught a couple of years at Southern Illinois and then I went . . . . [problems with recording device] C: Today is January 19, 2007. I’m Jim Crooks with the UNF Oral History Program interviewing Dr. Bruce Gutknecht. Okay, sorry, let’s start again. G: Okay, having taught school and been a principal for a number of years. . . . C: In the Chicago area? G: First two years of teaching, undergrad schooling was from Chicago, Southern Illinois, Red Bud, Illinois, outside of St. Louis, across the river from St. Louis. I taught for a couple of years there and then up to Detroit, where I was a teacher and principal, for I want to say about seven years or something like that. While I was there I did my master’s and doctoral at Wayne State. C: You and James Mittelstadt. G: That’s right. He and I knew each other briefly at the university. He was in a program, some core kind of program. He was a few years ahead of me on his doctorate. He went off to New England somewhere, New Hampshire I think, to teach. And I also was in the program at Wayne supervising master’s level interns and early MAT kind of program. I would be jumping ahead a little bit, but I think I will. When it came time to come down here, the College of Education, as you may have heard from others, Dean White insisted that the chairs go to visit the candidate at his or her home and meet the family, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So Dick McArdle, the first chair for whom I worked here, came to Detroit and visited me, and the following weekend, my wife and I were getting off a plane in Jacksonville with Jim Mittelstadt and his wife.. We were both here the same weekend interviewing for what we thought was the same position and so that’s the next time I saw him after three years of his work up in New Hampshire. It turns out that while we were both here interviewing and making the rounds we both received offers from the University of North Florida. So there was more than one position? C: Was this your first position after your doctorate? G: No. I was offered a position at the University of South Florida the year before I came here but did not take it because we were expecting our third child at the time, and I took a oneyear job as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan at the Dearborn campus – which was Henry Ford’s Carolina State; it was a branch campus in Dearborn – for a professor, Yetta Goodman, who was on leave for a year, so I basically taught there for a year, and continued to be in the search for a position.
C: What attracted you to UNF? G: Well, at the time I had three very different kinds of offers: one was at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, a small private college near Harrisburg and the University of Pennsylvania at Harrisburg. And then I was ready to accept Harrisburg when UNF called and said might you be interested in coming to UNF. We have this new program, a competencybased program, and I said, I’m just about committed to go somewhere else, but I will overnight stuff to you and you take a look at the stuff and we will talk on the phone tomorrow night or whatever. I think perhaps looking at something new in terms of a curriculum as well as a new university brought me here, so the newness of the place as well as the chance to have a new group of people, faculty members from various places, putting together a curriculum for the college. C: You came as an assistant professor? G: Yes. C: A fairly senior one, given your public school experiences of what, ten years. What was your impression of your colleagues when you got here? G: That’s an interesting thing and I think this has led to some issues over the years in the College of Education, maybe in other colleges too. Since almost everybody came from somewhere else, the initial relationships were, of course, academic or collegial working for the university, but they were also social. Nobody knew anyone else in town. I’m not sure that there were many people to know in town. The other big thing that was going on in Jacksonville at the time of course was Offshore Power Systems coming in. Many of us ended up buying houses in neighborhoods that contained UNF faculty or WestinghouseTenneco people. Kind of at the same economic level, close in suburbs like Briarwood, blah, blah, blah. So, academically, the idea of people not having been in one place for a while but coming from all over, I think was a strength and nice to have. It made for, on a professional level, a lot of diversity of thought in the way things ought to be done and what was needed and so forth and so on. C: Did your colleagues and their caliber rank with those that you saw in Dearborn and Wayne State? Part of the underlying question I keep asking is, how good are we? G: Unfortunately, I wasn’t at Dearborn that long to have that kind of experience. I think not only was it people coming from all over the place here, but it was new people. I don’t know the stats, well, as I said, Mittelstadt we had after three years out, but I’m not sure that there were a whole lot of people in our college that had more than one, two, or three years of experience in higher education at some other place. It seemed to me that it was recent doctorates, public school or private school experience. Teaching experience in K12 was one of the expectations of Dean White. And I think that helped give us some strength. C: Give me some impressions about Dean Ellis F. White [dean, College of Education and Human Services, 19701976]. He’s not here to be interviewed. G: Well, I remember one of his phrases was, we want people of good will. That was
one of his phrases he used talking to the chairs and the rest of the faculty. People of good will was where he wanted to be. He had very straight ideas about what he wanted and if something did not meet what he thought was correct, ethical, or whatever, then no. I’d have to say that he was a father figure, to me in a way, not to the degree of a personal father figure, but in terms of leading a group of new recruits to higher education. Well, he had been in the private sector, I believe, before higher education in personnel work or something, if I recall. C: He had been at NYU right before he came down here. I don’t remember in what role. G: He had, at the time, we kind of kidded, the white shirt, narrow tie, IBM look, you know, but it seemed to me that he emphasized to the chairs and subsequent search committees, although there weren’t that many in the early years, doing a really good job with finding people of good will who would fit in and contribute and so forth and so on. It seemed to me that that was definitely one of his strengths. C: Was he the initiator of the competencybased education approach. G: I’m not sure where that came from. I want to say that was maybe more Dick McArdle... Originally, the people in elementary and secondary ed, which was a department at the time, were hired by two different people, because McArdle was secondary and Nell Konwischer was supposed to be elementary, but she backed out of the whole thing before we ever opened. I want to say that McArdle was up on that stuff. C. Was that cutting edge back then? G: I believe so. It never fully materialized, the idea of continuous education – enter here, enter at any point – because the state at the time and the state university system rules called for the core structure, for quarter hours, which we were on at the time, and so a true competencybased program would have people assessed, placed in a program wherever they happened to be and then move on and exit the program whenever it was time to exit the program. I blame that on course dictates, particularly in education. The state has always dictated... as opposed to other fields where professional associations had more to say about what was included in the higher education curriculum. So I don’t think that fully materialized ever to have the continuous progress idea. C: And it sort of has been... G: Yes. C: A grounding philosophy. G: The idea of being very specific in terms of what the goals and objectives and expected outcomes in a particular course, that was very clear. That was probably a real positive contribution of developing a curriculum with competencybased ideas in mind so that stuff was very specified up front and in the syllabus, which became the handbook for the course as opposed to a particular textbook. Very specific, what we call learning activities now, matching objectives, and then of
course we evolved through SACS and NCATE, in particular, our accrediting agencies in the College of Education, to knowledge skills and dispositions and how to demonstrate what are the rubrics and how to get there. It’s almost, after all these years, come in a circle in that specificity that was required in the beginning has redeveloped the courses and the curriculum is here again. The difference is that a lot of it is being dictated by outside agencies now, the state, for example. But there was good stuff going on in that program all these years because I think because we started with the specificity. The students knew what was expected of them. There was no guess work. C: Was this unusual in the college of education? G: I believe yes. I believe colleges of education, in the other departments, colleges, and universities, the person teaching was more accountable for what was in the course than for some set of standards or expectations which were mutually agreed upon by people in the field. C: What were your connections with Andrew Robinson [dean, College of Education and Human Services, University of North Florida, 19761980]? How well did you know Andrew? G: He was Ellis’s alter ego. That’s another switcheroo, because Andy was in the vice president’s office at first. By the time we opened he was associate dean to Ellis in the College of Ed, if I remember that part of it right. C: I don’t know the first part but the second part is certainly true. G: Yes. And we got along fine... C: How would you describe him? G: ...until I became an administrator working for him. As a faculty member, I think it was Andy that kept our noses to the what goes on in the public school classrooms grindstone, because he had come through public school teaching and being principal and so forth and so on. He was a constant reminder and admonisher, you know, on how’s this going to be accepted, is this really what the teachers need out there. The focus was on Duval most of the time, what was going on out there, we had just gone through the disaccreditation and were in the early stages of getting reaccreditation. But I think that Andy was the guy that kept us focused on we were preparing these folks to teach in the public school classrooms and this is what it’s like out there, it’s not easy and so forth and so on. C: Looking back on that, do you think it made your program a better program for the students, this orientation. G: Yes, I do. Compared to other institutions in northeast Florida, like the one in Jacksonville where the students never got into an urban school, even in their internship. Our field experience program, which was with us from the beginning, made sure that it wasn’t their last term of their senior year now you’re going to see what the inside of a real public school looks like. Plus our neighbor down the street in Gainesville, once again, this same kind of thing. These internships are in real urban places where the majority of people live in urban areas and not out
in rural areas. So I do believe that that early focus did give our programs credibility and led to national awards in more recent years for these kinds of programs. C: I’m thinking in terms of one of the outside criticisms of colleges of education has been that they’ve been soft on content and soft on preparing students, and my question then becomes how well did your college of education, our college of education, do in this regard G: The content issue has always been around. I have spoken about that more years than I can remember. You do have to know the content. The elementary teacher does not need to know the content in the depth that the secondary teachers do. The secondary teachers need to know their history, etc. In our secondary programs from the beginning, our secondary majors in education always had at least thirty hours of content. C: They had a full major in history or English in addition to your education courses. G: Yes. I don’t think we were short there at all and elementary ones always... Nobody yet wants to say what an elementary teacher needs degrees in. Child psychology? I don’t know. But anyway, that, combined with the practical hands on stuff, now that field work, we’re just not talking about the last term internship, we’re talking about the field experiences, took different shapes and forms over the years and then once we had freshmen and started doing our own intro to education and that kind of stuff, I managed to force field experience in at that level. C: What kind of field experience, other than the internships, did students have. G: It varied over the years. Two others, other than the internship, spending x numbers of hours in a school classroom, one at the junior level, one at the senior level. C: Observing? G: No, teaching too. Starting off, yes. There was a progression of what you do. From the beginning, one of those – we had students coming in from Nassau, Clay, Baker, Bradford, St. Johns – one of those had somewhere along the way to be an urban school, and that was from the very beginning. C: From the very beginning. G: Oh yes. You know, we would have people from Glen St. Mary, who would say, well, my school’s down the state. Well, that’s okay for one. Not only that, now I started to mention that when we did intro and put it in early field, we called it early field, and I used to go to conferences and talk about it, which was a new thing, early field, talking about the junior and senior year. Here we were talking about the freshman and sophomore year, and that was an eighteenhour commitment in the local school, and there was another eighteen hour commitment to an agency or an institution, hooked up with a diversity course at the lower division. While this whole thing has changed structure over time, our students from the beginning have always been in the schools. C: Out of the ivory tower.
G: Yes, besides the internship. And of course students out there means faculty out there. While that’s a state requirement now, it wasn’t in the beginning. C: So you were ahead of the curve in that regard. G: I believe we were. So the marriage of the content stuff, particularly for our secondary students, plus the handson in the school classrooms have been some strong parts of our program. C: You mentioned Gainesville a moment ago and JU [Jacksonville University]. Other colleges more like ours, like West Florida or South Florida, FAU, Central Florida, have their colleges of education done comparable things or have we been a little bit ahead of the curve with regard to what they’re doing. G: Different curves. UF decided to put their students... to do a fiveyear plan. I’m not very good with dates, maybe ten years ago this push came along. Let’s have two majors. Let’s have a content major and a teaching education major. Probably the core teaching program down at Florida, probably 15 years ago, was that type of program. California went in a similar direction with a fiveyear program. We’ve maintained a four year. There were some good discussions in the college about that. It is perhaps because our students had extensive work in the classroom that the decision was to keep this a fouryear program. Different schools have taken different positions. At the same time Florida, the University of Florida, was also probably trying to be competencybased fifteen years after we did because they kind of obliterated course lines and I remember there was a period for a while where our advisors were having trouble figuring out what students had when they transferred from UF to here. For reading certification programs, for example, very specific courses were supposed to be there and how many credits in one area and all that. At the time, when you went through the transcript of students who had transferred from the University of Florida, you couldn’t tell if they had because they kind of blocked stuff together. Maybe that would be a better way of describing what they were doing in their teacher program. That was very hard to match for advisors to say you are going to need these programs here because we didn’t really know what you had there, that kind of a thing. Now as far as West Florida and the others I don’t know. C: What was your impression of students in the early years: prepared, good, indifferent. Do you have any particular memories about that? G: Probably a couple of different things. They wanted to be here. As you know the profile shows older than average ages so it seems like there had been people probably waiting around for the availability of quality higher education in Jacksonville, who took the opportunity and came in. Of course, we’ve heard the stats on first time in college with a family. Here it’s now available and you don’t have to run off to live somewhere else in order to pursue it. I’d like to say that, as I look at what my expectations have been from my students over the years, that the more I expected, the more they performed. However, the ones who didn’t perform, performed terribly. For the most part, higher expectations, as I have observed, equals higher performance, but for those who aren’t going to do it
anyway and are wondering why they were there, they failed more miserably because of the higher expectations, but they would have failed the lower expectations, too. C: Did you find these students stimulating? G: Probably more on the master’s level. These were probably teachers who bring into the college classroom stuff they did that morning, or observed last week, or a conversation they had, or a conference they attended, and that was real stuff, which was always better than... Because, you know, it’s hard to have students who have not experienced something. So particularly at that level. But once again, all those field placements that I’ve been talking about, of course, were not all positive and routinely... I would say to our students, how was it yesterday? Who’s got the best story, and the best thing that ever happened to them, I don’t know, who’s got the worst one. Often I’d hear the worst ones and then we would talk about them. We managed to draw out some lessons, even from negative examples. So the field helped our undergrad students; probably more discussion, more independent work would be at the graduate level. C: Have you seen it change in these students over the years in terms of, you mentioned desire before, you mentioned master’s students being more experienced. Have university students gotten better, in your impression, or worse, or something in between? G: Well, the easy answer, the one that comes to my mind first and probably isn’t the best one, is there is a bigger gap between those who are really with you and those who don’t know where they are. However, there’s been some other factors that have come along, and one is, of course, teacher shortages and we have alternative ways into the teaching profession today. And so almost like the newbies at the freshman level, the intro to education thinking, I’m going to take this introduction to education course thinking it’s going to be easy, it’s not going to be a challenge at all and then they get Gutknecht. We get people in alternative certification programs at the master’s level, some of them. When you get into some of the master’s level courses, oh well, education there’s nothing to this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they soon find out it’s not true. And so there’s kind of a third factor, so while good students are getting better, the poor students are getting poorer, and there’s another factor here. Folks who didn’t make it in whatever they chose for the first time around, whatever field it happened to be and see this need and job opportunities, and the jobs aren’t too bad. They see the benefits and the schedules and all and they think that won’t be hard to do, let’s go do that. The ones who think it won’t be hard to do don’t make it. So in the last five years I’ve had to modify my statements about the higher expectations, the higher the performance because, as I tried to say a little while ago, those who really aren’t there for the right reasons, they’re going to fail faster. I’m not quite sure that’s all bad for the profession. C: You mentioned your colleagues in the early years. Were they stimulating and challenging in terms of working together? You almost had to create a college
curriculum here in the first years. G: Well, yes, I didn’t pick up on the social aspect of the thing which led to some difficulties later. Professionally, of course everybody was expected to contribute. There were a few folks who didn’t last or stay on the faculty very long from the initial bunch for one reason or another, a year or two and they’re gone. Some of my older colleagues now, we talk about these folks from time to time. The publish or perish thing brought some interaction as far as conference papers and research. As I moved up to associate and then full professor, for a long period of time I tried to include junior faculty in research, sharing research, funding projects, or giving papers at conferences, this sort of thing. I felt that I put the hand out for that. With the papers, invariably for a period of time a junior colleague along and sharing on the paper, but my expectations there, too, were, okay, we’ll offer for a while and see what the performance is and then if there is a problem we won’t offer again. And there were those you know who shared and took hold and those who didn’t. But I think that’s what colleagues should do, and I’ve tried to do that over the years. There are many funded projects, contracts for research on which two or three of us would work together. Paul Eggen and Donna Keenan and I had several projects with the state department. I was trying some stuff out like that for a period of time. So there was a handson kind of development program with a few colleagues or some of the more major projects, AT&T’s Alliance for Tomorrow’s Teachers, some really big ones, with big funding involved a lot of us working together. The second year we were here, Bill Herrold and I did what was the largest funded project for the university at the time, and that was just the second year, with the U.S. Department of Education, the Right to Read Project. So there were those kinds of working together, as I think there should be. I don’t know if that spirit exists today, or if there’s more every person for himself. C: The faculty’s larger today, and it is a different generation in many ways. They may have a different spirit. G. Yes. Well let me go back to the social thing. After about ten years, people on the faculty started saying, oh it’s not like it was in the good old days. There never were any good old days. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education morphed into the Division of Curriculum and Instruction in the early 1980s. I was the first chair of that division. There would be people having differing opinions about stuff. Oh, I wish it were like the good old days. Well, the good old days really meant that the only social group that folks participated with were other people like themselves, university faculty. But as time went by and other interests developed and Jacksonville started growing and individuals looked in their neighborhoods, churches, or whatever, civic agencies, and other institutions, and that started... Well, there was a period of time when the Provost’s Office would say to the deans in the College of Education, can’t you get those folks to work together, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They’re not
governable. My department, the Division of Curriculum and Instruction, in the 1980s on, until last year, when it was reshuffled again, was one of those, you can’t govern that group. I think part of that was because for the first honeymoon years everyone was new, recent doctorates, first or second job in higher education, all focused on the mission of getting something new going. It’s a different kind of thing. I’m not sure the good old days ever existed, but if they did it was for those reasons. There is more diversity of thought and interest and all sorts of things now. C: The outside impression of the college faculty was that they had a very good esprit de corps and a substantial amount of conflict with the administration. G: Yes. That would be the second thing I said a little while ago, you know, a lot of ungovernable people. C: You became chair, in what, 1981. G: 1980, 1981, something like that. C: What was it like to be chair of Curriculum Instruction. Were the faculty ungovernable? G: Yes. C: How long were you chair? G: Two years. I was probably one of the longer ones. Well, first of all, the faculty didn’t decide on me, just like the recent revisions of the structure of the College of Education, the dean and company decided that. So the reorganization of the college basically was the chairs and the dean in the 1980s. They were going to go with these divisions, so I was not hired as the first chair of the division. Here’s where this name comes up again, the lady who was going to be chair of elementary education when we opened in 1972 but didn’t come was selected to be the new chair of the Division of Curriculum and Instruction that was created in 1980, 1981, 1982. But she didn’t come, again. So in desperation, the then dean, against her better judgment, asked me to do it. C: Bette Soldwedel? G: Yes. But of course then this was the period when Andy [Andrew Robinson, dean, College of Education and Human Services, University of North Florida, 19761980, 19831987; interim president, University of North Florida, 1980 1982]] was president or acting president but he didn’t get to be the president, at some point he came back to being dean. C: He was dean first, I believe because Ellis retired fairly early on. Andy became dean and then became interim president and then back to being dean. G: Okay, so Andy did follow Bette. So it was Andy I didn’t get along well with in terms of management and stuff. Faculty were fine with Andy and he provided some important focus for the college. Unmanageable group, well I think I wouldn’t say that. For that I would suppose I would lay it on me with the expectations I have for people. I expected people to do and hand in and sign their contracts and present this piece of whatever for the program and all that, and it was too much a waste of my time and everybody else’s. The
professionalism one would expect, or at least I expected, wasn’t there. So two years was it. C: And then you went back to fulltime teaching. G: Yes. C: Did you have any other administrative stops along the way? G: Oh, I was an assistant dean to Ellis. That was a year long. He started off with Andy as assistant and associate and then he always had a couple of faculty members around for a year or two. Tom Healy started out with him, too. C: When did Bill Merwin come on the scene? G: He came on as chair of elementary and secondary. Before it was Curriculum and Instruction. C: Did he follow McArdle? G: No, wait, he didn’t come on as that. He came here to teach social studies. You see, many of our chairs have been internal and some were not. I could name a couple of names you’ve probably never heard of who came from outside and left within a year. Mittelstadt was chair. Betty Flinchum was chair. Bill Merwin actually did come from within the division. He came here to teach social studies. I don’t know about Pritchy Smith. I think he might have come here as a chair. C: Would it be fair to generalize that chairs and deans across the board didn’t get along? Sounds like very short terms as chairs and that the faculty wasn’t the problem, but that it may have been due to management styles, management issues, and conflicts between chairs and above. G: The chair is like the school principal. Who you gonna please? You’re day to day on the scene, and you’ve got faculty and of course in a school you’ve got the kids and parents. Here, basically, you’ve got the faculty and the students, which have become more vocal over the years. I should have mentioned that earlier about students. There does seem to be the feeling today that I pay my tuition, teach me, and what do you mean I have to do some work outside of the classroom. Those are the ones in my classes who after the second week aren’t there any more. My last term teaching I had to teach a class down at Timberland School down in western St. Johns County. And what do you mean? Here I am in class for three hours, I’m teaching, and I have kids, and you want me to do some work. Yeah. Okay. But anyway, this idea, here I am, I pay my tuition, teach me. My teaching doesn’t work that way. My teaching is interactive and my students need to participate actively in what we are doing . It’s not the lecture, take this kind of thing. And I’ve been doing a lot of blended courses, lately, about half the time on the computer. Now back to the question of principal, of chair. I think the role of manager, whether it’s a school principal or it’s a department chair, I think these are very similar in who you gonna please? You have to please faculty. Who pays your paycheck? The dean. Or whose will do you serve? And so it’s kind of middle management. Middle management is tough. Who are you going to please? I’m going to answer one of your final questions right now because it seems to fit here. I learned an awful lot about administration
from Sam Russell, a very colorful character. Sam was one of my sub administrators. I had three when I was chair of the Division of Curriculum and Instruction. Bill Herrold, Mary Grimes, and Sam. And Sam taught me a lot, not only marshaling during commencements, because I followed him on that one, but in administration. He had been a department chair when we opened in vocational technical education. He had seen me as chair being bothered by this paperwork, this schedule. From Sam I learned one thing in particular: he would put the first request people would make of him (everything was done on paper in those days) in a little basket, and he said, don’t worry about it. If he’d get another request he’d put that there too. Unless they asked for it a third time, it would go away. And that’s how it worked. That’s colorful, isn’t it. Sam was trying to get me to relax a bit in the role as chair, not to be bothered by some of these things. But the chair thing is a tough one, and interpersonal skills, although I taught that course for twenty years here, it’s a tough one. Have everybody happy? I think the first week on the job I had the first discrimination suit on salary increases brought up by one of the people in our division. It’s a tough job. And it was big. We also had a big bunch of people in C & I. C: So the faculty was what, twenty people. G: Twenty, twentyfive. C: Plus adjuncts. After being chair, you went back to teaching full time, and you did that for the rest of your career. G: Got into some more grants stuff after that. It always seemed to me as I looked at myself and my career, I always wanted to be doing something in addition to teaching. Teaching is my prime enjoyment, in fact in two weeks I will start teaching a class again for the university. I had to stay off of the payroll for a month due to the DROP program. But I’ve always wanted to do some other stuff, and I got started on some postdoctoral work while I was chair, on aging and adult studies. So then I did some research on those areas after I went back to teaching, did some publishing in those areas. I actually did a certificate program here in the College of Health on aging and adult studies. And then when technology came along, I really got into that. I remember helping Jack Funkhouser and others unpack and set up the first PCs on campus. They were MacIntosh. Prior to that, everything, our IT, as we call it now, was all mainframe stuff. In the early years, it was all Gainesville, NERDC [Northeast Regional Data Center]. Our IT people, our computer people, tended not to want anything to do with standalone machines. I remember unpacking those gray boxes and putting them together. And that must have been about the time I was chair. I used a computer in the office when I was a chair for the first time for scheduling; it was a huge wooden box called NorthStar and the old word processing program called NorthWord, which later became Word, ran on that machine. The big disks and all that; the big printer sitting out there. So I got into that stuff in the late 1980s early 1990s. Then Kathe Kasten came along. C: So technology has been an area of your interest.
G: Yes. As a matter of fact, journal articles and conference papers for a period of time Connie [Gutknecht] and I did a lot together. And her dissertation is in that area. Using technology in instruction, Dean Kasten put the word to the faculty, I’ll support your efforts to bring technology into the classroom. I took that challenge, and some good stuff happened. Some good stuff, like the live classroom to classroom stuff, over at Don Farshing’s lab over in Engineering where they can see each other but have to talk on the phone line. This can’t be state of the art. At one time we had portable units out in public school classrooms , audiovisual, you know, live synchronous into our college. Students would watch the teachers teach and then ask the teacher questions. And that was a major effort to be supported at that period of time and I really enjoyed that. I read where we are using in the new social sciences building what I call instant response systems; we were experimenting with those, too, where each student was given a remote control unit which the professor had programmed that morning to ask questions and students push the button and professors see who has the answers right away. Do they have that over there in the social sciences building? C: I don’t know. I’m retired for six years. G: That long? C: Yes. G: So, that kind of stuff, to enhance instruction. We had a system kind of like that in Room 2113 in Building Nine. So technology became a focus. And now this might be out of chronology, but there was a long period of time when Connie and I did research and papers and articles on atrisk students. That must have been before the technology, that must have been before, because Andy Robinson had a conference, Southeast Conference on Assessment many years ago. He had speakers and outside panelists to discuss their papers and it was really good for the time. At that time I met Asa Hilliard, who might be retired now but he sits in a chair at Georgia Tech or wherever, and Asa had used the term – this was the time when minimal competency standards were coming along – and Asa would talk about actual competency standards. And so I kind of took off from that and then Connie and I, I think she was working in urban schools at the time, started looking at what kids have rather than what they don’t have. At the time, we did the whole atrisk thing, and not just the kids at urban schools but the kids at Ponte Vedra, whose risk is different. C: Why don’t you tell me about this atrisk thing? G: Okay. At risk of failure, okay, and a lot of folks say it’s the socioeconomic, it’s the racial, it’s the nonopportunity kind of stuff, and the answer is to spoon feed, and so we have programs in Jacksonville like that, like the ICARE group, that said we ought to do direct instruction for these kids. This is the only kind of learning that they can do. So we’ll never get these kids to do any more than the rote kinds of things, which is what direct instruction leads to, but never go beyond there, to the higher levels of thinking and comprehension. Thus, Asa Hilliard’s
comment about higher expectations. Connie and I got the idea that we shouldn’t focus on what those kids don’t have, we should focus on what they do have, and then build on those strengths that they do have, and that you don’t have to relegate kids to a lockstep see it, say it, sound it out like D.I. does, direct instruction, but we can leapfrog to higherlevel thinking. For example, I used Ponte Vedra kids versus urban kids a minute ago. The Ponte Vedra kid has no decisions to make in the morning. Breakfast is on the table, the clothes are laid out and clean, the van is waiting to take the kid to school, it’s all there. Many urban kids, a sleepless night taking care of a sibling or two or three and trying to find the wherewithal to get to school and something to eat. Well, those are real problems that that child is solving and working on whereas the Ponte Vedra kid doesn’t have to solve any of those problems. And so to think that we can’t have higherlevel thinking going on is remiss in some of the basic stuff here. I didn’t agree with... So our articles and papers on that take the resilient kid view, that’s the opposite. The resilient kid is the kid who someone would say is the street wise kid. Well, that might be part of it. Being able to bounce back from disappointment, failure, and not having the support from family or community that other kids have in other areas. But what makes kids resilient? Some research on that area, in that direction, what are some of the factors that do that. Those should be the things we should be encouraging. We did a series... And I’m just talking about this and thinking, well it’s all literacy in the early years and then somehow we got the atrisk stuff cycle going and then the aging stuff for a while and then the technology stuff. C: Did your atrisk research and writing have any impact on education? G: I get positive shakes of heads from my graduate students who are teachers when I talk about this stuff with them in classes today. But probably to those who heard us at conferences or read any of the stuff there probably was some impact. I saw an interesting thing. When we were on that cycle when we were in Dublin and did the RAI, they called it. They don’t call it the IRA [International Reading Association]. There it was RAI, the Reading Association of Ireland. The folks there: the shaking of the heads. We made two [presentations] that tended to relegate that kids who didn’t seem to get it as fast or have it, you take a fix the kid approach rather than modify instruction and our teacher perspectives on what we should be doing with these kids. I got a paper emailed to me from a friend in Australia last week and he was at Wayne State University while I was there. We stayed in touch, and he has come over for conferences, and I was supposed to do a sabbatical down there but that’s when I became chair so I missed out on going down there when he was dean of the college at the time. I got this paper from him last week. He’s retired. And it’s back to this theme about do we wade around in the lowlevel stuff or do we try to capture and move on to the stuff that has more meaning for kids. I scanned the paper. I haven’t read it yet. He wants me to respond to it, but that’s... And I thought, after all this time.
C: Going back to the college. This is fascinating, but I need to get back to the university. Your deans were White, Robinson, [Bette J.] Soldwedel [dean, College of Education and Human Services, University of Florida, 19801983], [Carl R.] Ashbaugh [dean, College of Education and Human Services, University of Florida, 19871991], [Donna B.] Evans [dean, College of Education and Human Services, University of Florida, 19911995], [Katherine] Kasten [interim dean, College of Education and Human Services, University of Florida, 1995 1997; dean, College of Education and Human Services, University of Florida, 19972004], Larry Daniel [dean, College of Education and Human Services, University of Florida, 2004present]. Do you have any particular stories that are worth remembering about any of the deans? You mentioned Kathe Kasten encouraging technology. G: Well, I’ll say something about all of them. Kathe did that. Kathe was also, though, promulgator and chief supporter of the structure of the college with the two divisions. She always wanted C & I, which was Curriculum and Instruction, which was made up of secondary people, elementary people, foundations people, all the subject areas in the world, wanted that division to function programmatically like the other division, which had three discrete pieces: administration or leadership, special education, and counseling. Those are three discrete pieces, but the pieces in C & I were never discrete. And she and I talked about this many times . The model was never functional, so now it’s back to departments. Larry has changed all that, without a lot of faculty input. So that was Larry and Kasten. Ashbaugh, I never really knew him. I know that he had some personal problems which affected his family life. C: His daughter was killed. G: I sympathize, but I also thought that maybe one shouldn’t have taken that kind of leadership role having a whole lot of other stuff to deal with. I don’t know, that might be a harsh judgement. I don’t believe he was very productive. C: Donna Evans came in there, too. G: That would have been before Ashbaugh. C: I thought Donna was afterwards because she was dean when I was interim dean in the [19]90s. G: Didn’t Kasten follow Ashbaugh. C: Kasten followed Evans. G: Oh. Well, Kathe Kasten was Ashbaugh’s student anyway, so she was around. She was associate dean. No, Cheryl Fountain was associate dean. Well, anyway, Ashbaugh, didn’t see much of him or hear much of him. Oh, Donna Evans. Loved her. I got along... There were some tough times in the college during that period where people didn’t love her. She reminded me so much of Detroit and Wayne State, which I think she came from Wayne as dean and then went to Ohio State. She was very urban oriented, and very school classroom oriented. It seems like the faculty either loved her or hated her. C: Why would people hate her? Gender, race, style?
G: I don’t know. Style maybe. Very different. She was very direct. I got along with her like I got along with Merwin when he was my chair. Merwin always said I would come in and pound on the desk, and ten minutes later all was well. Donna Evans was very direct. We did several projects together. Some of these larger projects came along during that time where we had numerous faculty working on various pieces of those things. C: What would be an example of a large project that would involve a substantial portion of the faculty. G: I mentioned the AT&T Alliance for Tomorrow’s Teachers. There were ten sites around, faculty mentoring... C: And what was the Alliance for Tomorrow’s Teachers. G: A new way of looking at and a new way of packaging and training teachers and the field stuff was all part of that. Another was one Royal Van Horne chaired during Donna Evans’s time, which was putting the coaching model into practice, where the faculty and the school system person worked together coaching at a certain school, and of course there were other projects... But that involved several hundred people, teachers, and several projects like that, bigger than the little let’s do the work of the department. That’s what I mean by larger projects. C: Were you involved in faculty governance? G: Oh yes. I was chair of the Faculty Association. C: There you go. G: Between one or two of the..., Shapiro and Judy Solano reigns. C: In the 1980s or 1990s? Any memorable events take place during then? G: Oh my. I haven’t thought about that in a long time. We met, were still meeting, where they meet now, in the Building Nine auditorium. C: Building Nine Auditorium? I didn’t know they had an auditorium there now. G: Schultz Hall. C: It became a snack bar. G: Oh no. It’s on the first floor of Building Nine. That’s where the plays were. That’s where the concerts were. Marianne Betkouski Barnes was the Faculty Association secretary, the elected secretary. Joyce Stover, a lovely lady, was eightyseven years old, and I still run into her at Publix, was our office manager. In fact I just saw her a couple of weeks ago. Jay Smith was on the Faculty at the time. He always brought some levity and focus to some issues. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed working with the then president of the SGA, Jamie Pearthree, who was president at the time I was president of the Faculty Association. And Andy must have been president of the college at the time. C: That would have been the early [19]80s. G: We can probably peg it that way. Because I remember we were all going to Tallahassee to do some lobbying. I talked Andy into chartering a plane out of Craig Field [Airport]. That was a firsttime experience for several people on that thing. Why take a whole bunch of people on different flights. C: Coming back to being Faculty Association president, and were there other areas
university wide that you were involved in – committee work or developing decisions or making decisions or advising the administration – that were memorable? G: I would have to review again. I was a member or chair of P & T [promotion and tenure] at the university level and faculty affairs and sabbatical selection committees. Probably the last committee I was the one that oversaw the library, the food services, and technology. C: Auxiliary Services, something like that. G: Now they’ve split that into a couple of committees. I was particularly interested in the technology issues at the time, Lambda Rail and Internet 2 and all that stuff, which I guess is a fact now. C: Did you work with VPs/provosts along the way and do you have any particular memories of, looking down the names, Roy Lassiter [vice president and provost, Division of Academic Affairs, University of North Florida, 19701977], John Minahan [vice president and provost, Division of Academic Affairs, University of North Florida, 19781982], Bill Merwin [vice president and provost, Division of Academic Affairs, University of North Florida, 19821985], John Bardo [vice president and provost, Division of Academic Affairs, University of North Florida, 19861989], Ken Martin [vice president and provost, Division of Academic Affairs, University of North Florida, 19891993], Alan Ling [vice president and provost, Division of Academic Affairs, University of North Florida, 19941995], David Kline [vice president and provost, Division of Academic Affairs, University of North Florida, 19962002, 20032004]. G: I probably worked less with Ling and Kline, but I worked a lot with Ken Martin. That’s how I got into the commencement business. He believed that the commencement stuff ought to be chaired and run by faculty members as opposed to staff members, and so that’s how I got started in that business. I think that whoever carried on after him, I think Kline said no we don’t need that and he turned it over to a staff member. But I did that stuff for 15 years, chairing the university’s commencement committee as well as being chief marshall. C: Did you enjoy it? G: Yes. I liked to march around in my robe on stage. [Laughing.] Yeah, I think my interactions, of course, in the early days everybody interacted, when we were all in Building One, the administration and the faculty, and when we wanted to talk to somebody, and this was very sexist at the time, we went to the bathroom together and talked. But I remember Roy Lassiter well, and somehow in the early years, I was somehow involved in the music culture, also. Before there was a fine arts department. I guess this would be when Jack Funkhouser used to direct the Messiah or concerts or requiem, blah, blah, blah, and we’d sing at St. Paul’s BytheSea, or similar and various musical events at that level and do receptions with the president, which was Tom Carpenter, and Roy Lassiter was there. There’s this group in the college, who are retired or are about to retire, that meets for lunch once in a while, and I put this out as a trivia question at the last
meeting, which was who was the man with the glasses and the cigar that seemed to keep Tom Carpenter running. You do know who I’m talking about, right. C: It was a short guy with white hair. G: Fred Simmons. C: Fred Simmons, yes. G: Well, we’ve come up with these. So those guys were around so long. C: Eight years to ten years, depending on... [Curtis] McCray [president, University of North Florida, 19821988] came on in the early [19]80s. G: Okay, that was presidents that you were asking about. I guess my other interactions with the vice presidents would have been through being chair of P and T or one of those committees where you had to make your report to that person, so there was some of that stuff. C: And you were president of the Faculty Association. G: Then that was regular stuff. Who was vice president? Early 1980s? C: Minahan. G: Maybe. Bardo was around there sometime. C: He came after Merwin. G: Oh. C: Minahan was [19]78 to [19]82, Merwin was [19]82 to [19]84, Bardo was [19]84 to, I’m not sure when he left. Gary Fane [interim vice president, Division of Academic Affairs, University of North Florida, 19851986] was in there as interim for a while. Ken Martin was [19]89 to the early [19]90s [1993]. G: So I guess when I did committee stuff I would probably have interacted with Minahan or Merwin. C: Any particular memories of them as leaders, administrators. G: I actually liked Bill Merwin as an administrator out of all the various jobs that he had: chair of our division and then as provost or academic VP. C: You mentioned earlier how when there was this conflict with management thinking that the faculty was ungovernable and the faculty thinking the leadership was autocratic perhaps. Was that on the college or the university level, in your experience? G: I saw it at both, but probably more at the college level. C: Because you had more contact with them. G: Sure. I didn’t know what the VP was saying to the deans. I had a lot of interaction with these folks through the commencement business in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. I know some of the VPs made a difference and some probably didn’t make a difference. I don’t remember major changes particularly with any particular one. C: No particularly outstanding or nonoutstanding sense of them being one or the other. OK. G: I probably worked well with Merwin and Ken Martin, then the other folks on either side of them.
C: What particular impressions of the presidents that we’ve had, [Thomas G.] Carpenter [president, University of North Florida, 19691980], [Curtis] McCray [president, University of North Florida, 19821988]. G: Carpenter and Lassiter get my high votes. Of course that’s the beginning. I couldn’t figure McCray out a great deal. One of his few favorite sayings sticks with me. He talked about the cyclical nature of education, whether it was with public schools or higher education, with each term a new beginning comes along. I don’t remember what he was. What was his background? C: English. G: English. I remember that was one of his things. Now, did he come in after Andy? C: Yes. G: So that was an easy thing to do. Probably. I have no positive feelings about Anne Hopkins. No positive feelings there. C: You want to elaborate on that? G: Sure. She just didn’t seem to make much of an impact on things around here. It was something like it was on the state level, I don’t remember any of that, the chancellors, they had this woman named Barbara Newhall in there. She did not make much of an impact in any direction on anybody in a positive way. And of course I was in Tallahassee for meetings when I was president of the Faculty Association, the faculty senate, as they called it, or the state university system senate, the presidents from all the schools. I enjoyed that kind of stuff. A little bit of politicking involved there too. Adam Herbert was an interesting guy. Was there a vote of confidence on him when he was here? C: It had to do with when Ken Martin was provost. And there was a reaction against Martin, which came particularly from Charles Winton. G: But wasn’t there a vote of no confidence in the president? C: I’m not sure. G: I kind of liked him. I participated in his investiture as chief marshall at the time and all of that. I liked the direction he was taking the university. I knew he was upwardly mobile. I thought I’d seen him eventually end up in Washington. I guess he’s still at Ohio State. C: Indiana. G: Indiana. Tom Healy’s still there too. C: During your years here at UNF, what are the major changes that you have seen take place? G: The growth of the university. You know, what did we start with, less than 2000? C: Less than 2000, yes. G: And with it, the burgeoning of the higher levels of the bureaucracy. Such as I mentioned a minute ago, as you know, we were all in one building at one time, and now the administration takes up several buildings. That kind of thing, et cetera. C: Has the university handled growth well? G: I don’t think so. In terms of, and I’m taking this from the student’s perspective
now, the personal. So many of the students who came here from other places as they did in the early years before we had freshmen and sophomores felt that I’m being treated as a person instead of as a number. I think we’ve lost some of that, and I think our current president’s slogan, “No one like you, no place like this” – I wrote about this in a letter to the editor which was published in the TimesUnion – it takes more than a slogan; it takes the real interaction to... C: Do you think there’s less of that now, from a student perspective? G: Yes, I think so, but maybe I don’t know. C: In the classroom or in student life. Do you feel, in terms of your own and your colleagues’ classroom roles that the students are getting as much attention as they did thirty years ago? G: I can speak for myself, my blended courses provide much more opportunity for one on one between professor and student electronically, and I have students tell me that, and studenttostudent interaction via the discussion board focusing on text topics or research papers. And remember I said much earlier there’s the students that really when challenged and have high expectations for their active participation in their learning, they really take off on that. But I’ve been doing, for the last fifteen years of my teaching, what I call journaling, and it started off with paper; we had paper then. Students would hand me a journal entry after they reflected upon their assignments. I would take them in and hand them back the next time. Morph that to an electronic learning lab in the College of Education in the 1990s, moved it to the Web and WebCT, move it now to Blackboard. The Blackboard journalling that we can do now, probably I kicked and screamed enough to get that feature in Blackboard. But in my own experience, I used to get much closer to students in their thinking and reflection on what they are learning. On the other hand, at the undergraduate level, I would do the same, maybe not to the degree that we do in the studenttostudent discussion boards that we do at the graduate level, but I do have students who come into the class, and always in the final journal entries – and I have saved these over the years, and I was always going to write this up. Never did, never will – I’ve had students say this is an extra assignment. They didn’t like having this extra assignment. I would always point out that this was not an extra assignment. This was part of the reflection and communications lines open in my classes for students who might not speak up in class. This gave them that opportunity. The overwhelming part of it was they liked the personal touch. Whether I can talk about it in any other way, I don’t know. C: Are there any other faculty to your knowledge in your college that use technology the way you have? G: Well, maybe not in the same way or to the degree, but we did experiments with totally online stuff. I don’t think there is any totally online stuff going on in the college right now. I did have a good colleague, Ellie Scheirer, over the holidays we had dinner. We talked and she wants to try something. I suggested something that might help. She spends a lot of face time with individual students
in the master’s as well as in the doctoral program, and she’s going to try some electronic stuff. I think the conversation that she, and Connie, and I had might have been helpful in shaping what she wants to do. I don’t know the answer to your question. I think that maybe the Cavanaughs in our college do a lot in there with technology and for technology purposes. Terry does assistive technology, you know, working with kids who are hearing impaired, or some other disability. Cathy does a lot of that online stuff with her students, but whether it’s the same. They teach courses on technology. What I do is not teach courses on technology, but teach a course in literacy or foundations at the master’s level, or education in America, whatever, using technology. C: Do others, like Pritchy Smith? G: No technology. Royal Van Horne is high tech, has done a Kappan column for years about technology. C: What I think I’m hearing you saying is that one of the dramatic changes over the last thirtyfive years has been the opportunity to use technology in the classroom as a vehicle for instruction and you’ve done that, gone a long way doing this, and some people haven’t. G: I think that’s true. C: Some people may never but others may... G: And use different technology. Dennis Holt has done a whole business on resumes and portfolios for teachers to develop on CDROMs, CDs, to give to prospective employers, you know this kind of stuff. He moved technology in that direction and so it’s different. C: And I guess the younger, newer faculty are more fascinated, more into it than some of the older ones. I don’t know, I would just have to guess. Any other major changes that you’ve seen. G: Well, what have I talked about. That we’re more top heavy and bureaucratic in positions. It probably hasn’t reached the same proportions as major universities, probably, but my feeling is it is still way too much. The more impersonal nature... And maybe other folks might say that that’s not true... C: Have you been involved with the extracurricular side of student education? It may range from – you mentioned the library or athletics or music or G: I participated in the music stuff in the early years, before we had enough students to put a chorus together, or do this kind of stuff and enjoyed the music people. Music is one of my avocations. No, athletics... Drama, when my daughter was a student here, got into that a little bit. C: What are achievements of the university that you’re most proud of? G: Well, that we made it. You know, some of the doubters in the early days, what do you mean out there in the swamp, what do you mean. I don’t know how many years people called us Jacksonville University, and then of course the branch of the University of Florida. I think we have a quality place. C: How do you know? G: I had a daughter who went here, graduated from here. I believe that, at least
